"If you love wealth more than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the
animating contest of freedom, depart from us in peace. We ask not your counsel
nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains rest
lightly upon you and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen."
Samuel Adams, (1722-1803)

Monday, February 29, 2016

Samantha Bee put her money where her Thin Mints were on Monday as she
offered support to the Girl Scouts of Eastern Missouri against St.
Louis Archbishop Robert Carlson.“You have underestimated our love of girl power — and our love of
cookies,” Bee said to Carlson before revealing that the program bought a
“sh*t-ton” of Girl Scout cookies to give to her audience. She also
directed viewers to her website, which is encouraging them to “ruin an awful archbishop’s day” by either buying cookies or donating to the Girl Scouts directly.Carlson drew Bee’s ire after he contacted local parishes and urged them to cut ties with the Scouts, saying they were “becoming increasingly incompatible with our Catholic values.”Among the behaviors troubling Carlson, Bee noted, was the fact that the Scouts were working with Amnesty International.“I guess trying to stop the beheading of political prisoners doesn’t count as ‘pro-life’ enough for him,” she quipped.However, she also highlighted Carlson’s testimony in May 2014
concerning the sexual assault committed by former Father Thomas Adamson.
Adamson met with Carlson in 1980 while both men worked under the
Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis. At the time, Carlson handled
sexual abuse cases for the archdiocese, but Adamson’s crime was never
reported.“You knew it was a crime for an adult to engage in sex with a kid,” a prosecutor can be heard saying in footage of Carlson’s testimony.“I’m not sure whether I knew it was a crime or not,” Carlson responds.Yet at the same time, Bee said, Carlson found the Girl Scouts’ support for contraception to be part of “a troubling pattern of behavior.”“If you don’t want girls getting knocked up and you won’t let them
have contraception, you’d better teach the Boy Scouts to use some of
those fancy knots on their d*cks,” she said.

A CNN contributor who doesn’t seem to understand how politics have
evolved since the Civil War repeatedly insisted the Ku Klux Klan was a
liberal organization.Jeffrey Lord, a former associate political director in the Reagan
administration who frequently calls on modern Democratic Party to
apologize for sins committed by historical Democrats, appeared Monday to
discuss a former Ku Klux Klan leader’s backing of Donald Trump, reported Media Matters.David Duke, the one-time Grand Wizard of the KKK and a one-term
Louisiana state representative, threw his support behind Trump, who has disavowed the endorsement but also said he would need to research white supremacist groups before commenting on them.“Donald Trump isn’t playing the game, although he certainly denounced
him,” Lord said. “I mean, David Duke is a hardcore leftist. He’s an
anti-Semite.”Duke served in the Louisiana legislator as a Republican from 1989 to
1992, but he has run long-shot presidential and legislative campaigns as
both a Democrat and Republican.Lord then argued that the KKK, which was founded by angry former
Confederate soldiers during the Reconstruction era and terrorized blacks
throughout the first half of the 20th Century, was associated with the
Democratic Party.“The Ku Klux Klan is a function of the left,” Lord said. “It was the
military arm of the Democratic Party. Hello? Donald Trump’s daughter and
son-in-law are Jewish. David Duke is an anti-Semite, for heaven’s
sakes. This is ridiculous.”Many members of the historical KKK were Democrats, but most
historians and political scientists agree that the Democratic Party of
the late 19th and early 20th centuries bear little resemblance to
today’s Democratic Party.The long-standing link between the Democratic Party and white
supremacists in the south began unraveling during the 1960s as the
national party became increasingly aligned with the black civil rights
struggle and white southerners began to vote for Republican candidates.CNN host Margaret Hoover did not correct her guest’s claims, but she
dismissed the KKK as a hate group that was no longer affiliated with any
traditional political party — but Lord wouldn’t hear it.“It is a racist hate group from the left, and that counts,” Lord
said. “That is important to understand. It is not conservative. It has
nothing to do with conservatism. All of these Klan members who have been
elected to Congress and U.S. Senate and governorships over the years,
supporting Franklin Roosevelt because they like Social Security. Let’s
get our history straight.”In fact, a recent study showed how the KKK played an active and enduring role in steering southern white voters away from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party.By 1992, when Duke sought the GOP presidential nomination over party
leaders’ objections, a poll found that even decades after the KKK’s
decline, Republican voting was strongest in southern counties where the
Klan was active in the 1960s.“The Klan played an active role in encouraging white southerners to
prioritize white supremacy over party loyalty,” the study’s authors
found.Lord, however, said the controversy would only strengthen Trump’s appeal with some voters.“This is why — this is exactly the kind of thing why people are
voting for Donald Trump,” Lord said. “Because they think the media is
making something out of nothing. Nothing. This is crazy.”

Friday, February 26, 2016

OKLAHOMA CITY -- A retiree says he was "duped by the Donald" and lost
$35,000 to Trump University, a short-lived and controversial Donald
Trump business venture. A single mom says she "made a huge mistake
trusting him" and lost just as much money, maybe more. A man identified
only as "Kevin" says Trump University ruined his credit; he called
Trump "a fraud, a misrepresentation, a B.S. artist."The American Future Fund -- a conservative nonprofit based in Iowa that advocates for conservative and free-market issues -- released three ads Friday
that use these former Trump University students to attack Trump, the
Republican presidential nomination front-runner. Each student,
identified only by first name, urges voters not to trust Trump."I
was scammed because I believed in Donald Trump -- he can make people
believe practically anything," the retiree says in one of the ads. In
another, Kevin says: "America, don't make the same mistake I made with
Donald Trump."

Trump has repeatedly defended Trump University, which was never
licensed as an institution of higher education, and has said that a
majority of students were satisfied with the real estate training
program. Trump University started in 2004, and about 80,000 people
attended free introductory seminars held in hotel ballrooms across the
country. About 9,200 of those participants then paid $1,495 for
three-day real estate seminars, and nearly 800 paid up to $35,000 for
all-inclusive packages that included one-on-one mentoring.

Trump
University changed its name to the Trump Entrepreneur Initiative in May
2010 -- the New York State Education Department had deemed the
"university" part of the name misleading -- and, soon after, stopped
operating. The venture is still caught up in three pending lawsuits,
including a $40 million suit brought by New York Attorney General Eric
Schneiderman (D).Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Ted Cruz
(R-Tex.) both mentioned Trump University during the GOP debate on
Thursday night, forcing Trump to explain and defend himself. Trump has
repeatedly said he did nothing wrong. A spokeswoman for Trump's campaign
did not respond to a request for comment on the new attack ads.

The
ads were posted on the nonprofit group's website on Friday, but a
representative of the group did not respond to a request for comment.
The New York Times reported
the group plans to spend millions of dollars airing the ads, which are
reminiscent of attack ads Democrats used against Mitt Romney in 2012
that featured people who said they were victimized by Bain Capital, the
private equity firm where Romney was a partner.

Wednesday, February 24, 2016

The co-writer of the cult sci-fi comedy Idiocracy confirmed what many of the film’s fans probably felt about the current political climate, The Hill reported.“I never expected Idiocracy to become a documentary,” Etan
Cohen posted on Twitter on Wednesday. The 2006 film centered around two
people who awaken from a cryogenic sleep to learn that the country is
awash in anti-intellectualism. “I thought the worst thing that would come true was everyone wearing Crocs,” Cohen added.The movie, which Cohen co-wrote with director Mike Judge, garnered
critical praise and a cult following despite being under-promoted by
20th Century Fox during its US theatrical release. “People will email and post stuff on my Twitter that’s like, ‘Hey,
you predicted it right!’ So that’s always nice. But it’s not always nice
because you want the world to become a better place,” Judge told The Verge in 2014, adding, “Yep, we’re doomed. Might as well make jokes about it.”Terry Crews, who played President Camacho in the film, reprised the character on his own Twitter account last month, telling fans, “ALL Y’ALL NEED TO STOP TRIPPIN. CHILL THE F OUT, ‘MERICA.”

Monday, February 22, 2016

RAW STORYDNA coaxed out of a 12,000-year-old fossil from Argentina is
providing unique insight into one of the strangest Ice Age giants: a
tank-like mammal the size of a small car with a bulbous bony shell and a
spiky, club-shaped tail.Scientists said on Monday their genetic research confirmed that the
creature, named Doedicurus, was part of an extinct lineage of gigantic
armadillos. Doedicurus was a plant-eater that weighed about a ton and
roamed the pampas and savannas of South America, vanishing about 10,000
years ago along with many other large Ice Age animals.“With a length of more than three meters (10 feet) from head to tail,
it certainly looks like a small car, like a Mini or Fiat 500,”
evolutionary biologist Frederic Delsuc of France’s Université de
Montpellier, one of the researchers, said.It was a member of a group called glyptodonts that shared the
landscape with giant ground sloths, sabre-toothed cats and towering,
flightless, carnivorous “terror birds.” Some glyptodonts made it as far
north as southern portions of the United States, from what is now
Arizona through the Carolinas.The researchers were able to place Doedicurus and the other
glyptodonts into the armadillo family tree after studying small
fragments of DNA extracted from bits of the creature’s carapace. They
used a sophisticated technique to fish mitochondrial DNA out from a soup
of environmental contaminants that had leached into the fossil over the
eons.They determined the glyptodont lineage originated about 35 million
years ago. The oldest armadillo fossil, from Brazil, was around 58
million years old.Asked what someone might think upon encountering Doedicurus, another
of the researchers, evolutionary biologist Hendrik Poinar of McMaster
University in Canada said, “That’s the biggest armadillo-looking
creature I’ve ever seen, and it has a tail like an Ankylosaurus. Yikes!”Doedicurus resembles the dinosaur Ankylosaurus, which also was heavily armored and wielded a club-like tail.The researchers said the resemblance was an example of “convergent
evolution” in which disparate organisms independently evolve similar
features to adapt to similar environments or ecological niches.Scientists have debated whether humans contributed to the extinction
of the glyptodonts. Poinar said he believed that humans played a role,
saying most of the large mammals of that time were under pressure not
only from climate change as Ice Age waned but also from human hunting.The research was published in the journal Current Biology.

Thursday, February 11, 2016

Shocking new revelations appear to show that the Republicans in
Congress are insisting in pursuing their treasonous efforts to go around
the President’s back and derail his foreign policy agenda. Last year,
led by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), forty-seven Republican traitors sent a
letter to the Iranian government in an attempt to scare them out of the
President’s historic nuclear peace accord. Republicans in Congress were then caught taking bribes from foreign governments in exchange for their efforts against the White House.But this time, they have gone too far. The Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council (SNSC), Ali Shamkhani, alleges that Congressional Republicans attempted to parlay with the Iranian government in an attempt to postpone the recent prisoner exchange until after the election.

“In the course of the talks for exchanging prisoners, the
Republican rivals of the current US administration who claim to be
humanitarians and advocates of human rights sent a message telling us
not to release these people (American prisoners) and continue this
process (of talks) until the eve of US presidential elections. However,
we acted upon our independent resolve and moved the process forward.”

These false patriots and treasonous dogs wrap themselves in the flag
while secretly negotiating behind closed doors to condemn five
Americans to languish in an Iranian prison just so they can use their
captivity as a political weapon with which to bludgeon the President and
the Democratic candidates. Their hypocrisy is incredible – the GOP has
been obsessed with finding out the “truth” of the tragic deaths of four
Americans in Benghazi, and then turn their coats and work to keep five
Americans in the hands of the people they themselves call an enemy?
American lives are nothing but political pawns for these self-serving
cowards and fools.It is a shocking and depressing day to see our legislators behaving
with such disrespect for the office of the Presidency and his agenda and
for the well-being of American citizens abroad. They have
threatened our national security by exposing our partisan divide to a
nation that they themselves insist wants to destroy us and
previously worked to prevent President Obama from neutralizing that same
nation’s nuclear program. They have disgraced our nation and the office
they serve, and they must be made to pay for it next election.

Tuesday, February 09, 2016

More than a month since a group of anti-government extremists took
over a federal wildlife refuge in rural Oregon and nearly nearly two
weeks since the authorities arrested most of the group's leaders in a
dramatic confrontation that left one of the occupier's dead, the
standoff drags on with no end in sight. Hopes that arrests of the ringleaders would lead to a quick and
peaceful resolution to the ongoing takeover have diminished as the
holdouts still at the refuge dig in and the occupier who was killed,
LaVoy Finicum, has been elevated as a martyr in extremist circles. The remaining diehards at the Malheur National Wildlife Center have re-dubbed it "Camp Finicum."National attention on the standoff has waned since Finicum's death,
but things have continued to get weirder. Franklin Graham, the minister,
has gotten involved at some level to try to bring an end to the
standoff. Ammon Bundy, the main leader who is now jailed in Portland,
reportedly in solitary confinement, has been making regular statements
to the public via recorded messages released by his lawyers, and police
have tightened the cordon around the refuge even as the handful of
militants holed up inside ​have sounded the call for their supporters
on the outside to "stand up" in their defense.Here's what has happened since Ammon Bundy and brigade were arrested last month:

Ammon Bundy amps up his rhetoric against the authorities

Since immediately after his arrest, Ammon Bundy has shifted his tone in
the messages he has been delivering through his lawyers. At first, his
attorneys read statements in which he urged
the remaining occupiers to leave the refuge. But more recently, his
lawyers have posted audio messages apparently recorded of Bundy in jail
in which Bundy directs his scorn at authorities.
"Go home Oregon State Police. You have already killed enough," he said in one message last week. "Go home FBI. It is time to end this."In another that was posted Monday, Bundy urged elected officials to stand up for the occupiers now facing federal charges.“It is your duty to hold federal agencies at bay, protecting the people in your state," he said.Bundy, along with more than a dozen others involved in the takeover, were in indicted by a grand jury on
a single count of conspiracy to impede officers of the United States.
Eight occupiers, including Bundy, were arrested Jan. 28, and three more were arrested the next day, though some of them have been released from custody on bail.

Those who remain at ‘Camp Finicum’ start posting videos again

David Fry -- a self-described gamer, the tech guru for the occupiers,
and one of the four people believed to be still at the refuge -- posted a
series of videos to YouTube Sunday. He called the transmission a
“miracle” after the occupiers told Oregon Public Radio last week they believed the FBI had shut off their lines of communication.
In one message,
Fry called those who reportedly disrupted a make-shift memorial site
for Finicum “trash” and said, “It’s time that the good people stand up,
bear arms and tell all these evil trash people to piss off.”He also signaled the need for more support for those within the refuge, as “supplies aren’t unlimited.”“How much longer are the American people going to sit here and wait
and let the FBI snuff people like us out?” Fry said. “We are out here
making a stand.”In another video
-- titled “Shove your charges where the sun dont [sic] shine!” -- Fry
shows off the federal property his group has hijacked, and takes a
vehicle owned by the government for a “joy ride.”“We are going to use every resource we have here. And I think we have every right to do that,” he said.Another video
features Sean and Sandy Anderson, a husband-wife duo who remain at the
refuge and claim they are being “held hostage” because they now face
criminal charges.“The rest of them have felonies, that’s not going to make us want to go home any sooner," Sean said.Franklin Graham has also been called upon by the
occupiers to act as an intermediary between authorities and those still
at the refuge. Graham’s spokesman confirmed last week he had been in contact with both sides of the dispute, and in a YouTube video posted Sunday, Fry recounted the phone conversation he had with the evangelist.
“I never talked to him before this. i never actually
followed him much before this. But speaking to him on the phone he seems
like a pretty good guy,” Fry said. “We asked for prayers. We asked that
people in America know to give us prayers so we can make it through
this.”Fry also referenced a message Graham posted on his
Facebook page Saturday in which Graham said he was "praying" for a
peaceful resolution for the "complicated" dispute.

Authorities shut off access

The authorities, meanwhile, do not appear eager to further escalate the
situation, but have shut off access to and from the refuge, limiting the
occupiers’ lines of communication and supplies.
According to Oregon Public Radio,
over the weekend law enforcement erected signs to further discourage
any attempts to reach the refuge -- be it by a member of the media or a
militia man wishing to join the occupation. The lighted sign flashes the
messages, “Road Closed, “No Unlawful Entry” and “Subject To Arrest."The occupiers have been calling upon local sheriffs to join them in
their fight against federal officials, an idea the Oregon State
Sheriffs' Association rejected in a statement released Friday
that said the group does “not agree with or support any citizen or
elected official who would advocate for change in a manner that includes
illegal action, threats of violence, or violence against any citizen of
the United States.”The question of who will ultimately pay for the occupation
has also come up. U.S. Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) introduced a bill
last week that would shift the $100,000 per week he estimated the
occupation cost local and state authorities to the federal government,
which in turn could recoup the costs from the occupiers via a Department
of Justice civil suit.

Another arrested occupier claims he is a journalist, but a judge refuses his release

Pete Santilli, a talk radio host who has a YouTube show, was among those
arrested for his involvement in the occupation, but was unsuccessful in
his attempts to convince a judge to release him on bail.
The Huffington Post reported
that he was often seen with his domestic partner Deborah Jordan -- who
also traveled to Burns, Oregon after the takeover -- carrying gear and
standing with the press. His lawyers also produced receipts from a local
motel to prove he wasn't participating in the takeover.Nevertheless, prosecutors pointed to videos posted to his YouTube
account supportive of the occupiers and even calling for others to join
them. Ultimately, U.S. District Judge Michael W. Mosman denied his request
to be released from custody on bail, citing claims Santilli made on his
YouTube show well before the occupation that he had a cache of
unregistered guns.